“I’m giving away my zoo”: Animal saviour Harry Kunz has his own wounds to heal
Harry Kunz became a worldwide sensation when he offered to give his wildlife sanctuary away to anyone who would care for the animals. Susan Chenery meets a man with a passion for all creatures who has his own wounds to nurse.
The enormous wedge-tailed eagle looks at you with something like contempt. It sits on a tree trunk, grounded with a broken wing. With its hooded eyes, formidably sharp beak and sheer power, it’s a relief Australia’s largest bird of prey is safely behind wire mesh.
Harry Kunz, 70, has a lot of respect for the bird. “They’re toptier predators,” he says. “They keep balance in the environment, so you have to admire them.”
Arriving at Eagles Nest Wildlife Hospital in Far North Queensland is like walking into Jurassic Park. There’s something prehistoric about Australia’s wild animals when they’re seen together. After the alarming raptors’ enclosure, there are the emus. Much taller than us with bulky bodies and tiny heads, they watch beadily as we pass. “They can kill you with their feet,” Harry notes.
He’s covered in cuts and scratches from the fangs and claws of the hostile animals brought here to be healed, with broken wings and legs, bleeding from being shot or hit by trucks, ripped open on barbed wire fences. “That’s just part of you,” he says with a shrug. “You can’t blame the animal, as they’re more afraid than you. They just want to defend themselves; they’re injured and stressed.”
The call can come any time of the day. Even though he’s sometimes in so much pain he can barely get out of bed, Harry’s adrenaline starts pumping and off he goes in his rickety van, along red-earth roads to rescue
an animal that’s suffering. Or they’re brought to him from all over the top end of the country.
Yesterday, he was under a car untangling an angry two-and-a-halfmetre amethystine python that had wrapped itself around the axle after it was run over. Then he was up a tree seeing if a bird had been shot.
He shouldn’t be doing any of this. Harry had a fusion in his back and a total hip replacement. Yet three days after returning from the hospital, he was on a ladder fixing cages, fell and wrecked his hips. “My fault,” he says.
This morning, a tiny kangaroo joey is brought in, found in a box outside the local IGA. Harry cradles it in his hands. “You have to bring her to 36 degrees,” he says, tenderly, “then you can feed her. Sometimes you have to feed the little ones every few hours, day and night.”
Animal instinct
It’s relentless and exhausting. There’s never a day off as the animals depend on him – without fresh water, they’ll die in this heat. “You’re a mother; you can’t lose your patience with your kids,” Harry explains. “I’ve lived with them for so long, they’re my family.”
All creatures great and small, there is no discrimination. Thousands of Australian native animals have passed through here. At the time of The Weekly’s visit, there are 60 residents, some feathered, some scaly, some furry, all with sad stories, all in various stages of repair, and most of whom will be released back into the wild when they’re better. “I have an 80 per cent success rate,” Harry says.
When he bought the two hectares at Millstream, about 130 kilometres south-west of Cairns, in 1999, “word had got out that there was a nutcase who looked after wildlife”.
With his grey ponytail and beard, and larger-than-life personality, it’d be easy to mistake Harry for one of the eccentric misfits who wash up in the Far North and go native. Yet Harry’s feeling for native animals is primal and evangelical – he is a man on an environmental mission. “The animals all have a purpose,” he says. “There’s a reason why they’re here.”
It’s just humans he can’t understand. The people who caused all these beautiful animals to be broken and sick. Cutting down habitat, poisoning them, shooting them for fun. “There’s no bigger, stupider predator [than people],” he states. “Human behaviour is still a mystery to me.”
Animals, he says, “just have different priorities, that’s all.”
Harry grew up in Austria, in a family of factory workers. He was a chef at a restaurant, but there was a call of the wild that he couldn’t ignore. “I wasn’t happy with my life,” he says. He was planning to go to South Africa when a friend told him about “Bondi Beach and the topless girls”.
From the moment he arrived in Australia in 1982, at the age of 36, he was enthralled with the exotic animals. “They were so unique,” Harry says. He’d pick up injured cockatoos and galahs, and wait in vets for hours, only to be dismayed when the vet wanted to put down animals of “no importance”.
He spent four years driving around Australia. A stranger in a strange land, seeing rapturous beauty in the things we take for granted.
“I could see the dingoes watching me, coming closer and closer,” he
I’ve lived with them for so long, they’re my family.
recalls. “I was fascinated by marsupials and the colours of the parrots.”
By 2003, Harry had run out of his $170,000 in life savings. “I really thought I’d have to give up,” he says. There are vet costs, petrol to pick up the animals – the feed alone is about $4000 a month. Yet he’d fallen in love with a woman who had come to be a carer and together they decided to turn the place into a charity.
Since then, it’s run on donations, guardian angels, small miracles, often down to the wire. “Wonderful people would come in at the last moment,” he says. “Sometimes you get five euros from Europe, or $50 from America; it all adds up.” After seven blissful years, his partner left – “I still don’t know why” – and he’s been doing it on his own ever since, with the help of volunteers coming and going.
And now Harry’s the one who needs healing. He urgently requires another operation, but he can’t take the time away from the animals. Some days, he crawls out of bed, limps around the cages to feed them and then collapses. He just can’t do it anymore.
Five years ago, he tried to sell Eagles Nest as a wildlife hospital, but only got “nutcases” who wanted to turn it into a zoo. “I don’t want someone to turn it into a money-maker,” he says.
Looking for a keeper
Now Harry’s decided to give it away, but only to people who’ll continue his work and legacy, and keep the hospital going to save wildlife. “I have no family, nobody here,” he says.
The response has been staggering. Thousands of people from all over the world have emailed (there has even been the odd marriage proposal). “It has just got out of control,” he says. “We’ve even heard from people in Israel and Romania. A lot of them are kids, young ladies, 21 or 22. That’s their dream, but there’s no way any one person can do this. You need a family that’s really committed to it.
It’s hard to find someone who has a passion to be in a thankless career.”
Harry and his volunteers are still sorting through the applications.
It’s hard not to notice the four big dingo enclosures are empty. Harry believes it’s because they have been poisoned. “Queensland is the only state where they’re seen as pests,” he says.
Harry believes dingoes are unfairly maligned. “They’re top predators, the most important,” he explains. “They control the pest animals, if we let them. They’ll never attack a bigger animal, such as a cow or a sheep, like people think they do. That’s the feral dogs.”
He has two dingoes that can’t be released, Honey and Mikhail, who are magnificent with their yellow eyes. They adore him, but only him. Other people aren’t advised to approach them. “The dingo is not a dog,” he says. “They’re bright and cannot be broken in. You don’t have to teach them anything and you cannot force them. They watch, they listen, they’ll do it, but in their own time. They are just amazing.”
In one small enclosure, you can just see the snout of a dingo puppy hiding under a piece of bark. Someone thought it’d be cool to have one as a pet. “He’s been on a chain for quite a while,” Harry says. “Probably didn’t get as tame as they wanted, so they dumped him.
If he stays scared, I can put him in an enclosure, then he can have no contact with people and he can be released.”
Too much contact with humans is a death sentence for an animal that is to be released into the wild – they need to know to run away and not seek humans out for food. Harry thinks there would be less cruelty if people could just understand that animals aren’t so different to humans.
“They have emotion, personality,” he says. “If it is a dingo, a kangaroo or an eagle, you will have an aggressive one, a gentle one, an adventurous one and a wallflower. When you live with them, you see all this. They have intelligence, but just in a different way to humans.”
People need to understand the role birds and animals play in their habitat. “The animals all have a purpose on this planet; there is a reason why they are here,” he says. “Everything has its purpose in our environment and our lives. People need to care about the environment. It gives us everything – oxygen, food, water. Don’t poison the environment. If we destroy it, we destroy ourselves.”
I don’t want someone to turn it into a moneymaker.